Starbucks: “Park Slope is Not Really Brooklyn”

During an interview with a Park Slope-based writer for the Financial Times, the Brooklyn-bred CEO of Starbucks, Howard Schultz, got to gabbing about where he grew up:

We talk about Brooklyn for a while, a borough whose reputation as a rough melting pot has changed in the past few years towards becoming a symbol of gentrification. I live in Park Slope, the epicentre of the shift. “That’s not really Brooklyn,” Schultz says quickly. I mention another chief executive I’ve met who grew up in Bensonhurst. “That’s Brooklyn,” he says approvingly.

Others think differently: Bensonhurst recently appeared at the bottom of Brooklyn Magazine‘s neighborhood power rankings. Anyway, I used to use this space to, say, put something like this in a broader social context. But I no longer have opinions about anything.

One Comment

As someone who was a third generation Park Sloper and raised three kids as the fourth generation of my family residing in Park Slope I think I can speak somewhat more authoritatively about Park Slope than Mr. Starbucks.Where did he grow up? Does he know that Park Slope was always part of Brooklyn? True, many current residents aren’t even native New Yorkers, never mind bonafide Brooklynites. But that doesn’t make the Slope less a part of Brooklyn. Does Mr. Starbucks know that Washington Park on 5th Ave in Park Slope once was the sight of Brooklyn Dodger baseball games as well as bearing historical significance vis a vis the Old Stone House and the Battle of Brooklyn? Did he ever try to find Bensonhurst on an old map of Brooklyn? Park Slope is very much Brooklyn. Bensonhurst was a later addition when eventually all of Kings County became part of Brooklyn, and ultimately part of the City of Greater New York.